Thirdhand
by ulstergirl
Summary: Scully decides that she wants her life back. MSR, post finale.


**Set about three years after the end of the series. I'm not sure how I feel about this one, so please, my discerning reader, let me know if you like it, and whether you think it should continue. **

* * *

She dyes her hair blonde now. Not platinum, not the pale color of newborn chicks, but the rich golden color of honey. The red always bleeds through, so they do it on Friday nights, his sweating hands fumbling the applicator through the thin plastic gloves, and on Saturday mornings she sprawls in the sun, covered head-to-toe in sunscreen, but the freckles show on her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, the points of her shoulders anyway.

She has never been one for luxury, and this life hasn't afforded them much. But when she sleeps, she sleeps in satin and silk, on Egyptian cotton. When he comes home with the sweet heady taste of beer still on his lips and they begin the slow dance they learned nearly ten years before, she's always in silk or satin underneath, thin lace, black mesh over the pale rise of breath. He closes his eyes in the dark and when he opens them, she doesn't look like herself anymore. The woman he fell in love with wore her hair in a red bob and her face was never quite so thin as this, but the woman who shares his bed has hair the color of honey and sometimes she cries herself to sleep at night when she thinks he's beyond hearing her.

Even in bed, they don't say each other's names anymore.

She's taken a job at the high school as a science teacher. When she'd walked out of the house the morning of her certification exam, in pearls and a matched twinset, he'd called her Laura and she'd laughed, but when she returned she flung her keys on the counter, her frustration palpable.

Teaching at Quantico was one thing. Teaching teenagers the difference between mammals and reptiles was quite another, she fumed, shoving her feet out of her heels, but even then she hadn't thrown them because everything they had, everything in this house, was too precious to waste, even a pair of cheap fawn-colored pumps.

They had nothing left, from before, and sometimes he thought that wore on her most of all. His world had contracted to her and only her, but everyone else he'd ever known and loved was gone. Their first Christmas, after, she had made the entire meal from scratch and then sat holding his hand at their kitchen table until his fingers had gone numb, but he hadn't pulled away, and her blue eyes were somewhere else. In a white house on the East Coast, with a mother she couldn't even risk calling.

School's been back in session for a week now, the streets are all free of the usual roving gangs of bored teenagers, when the secretary calls and asks very sweetly whether "Miss Hale" is sick, and if she should go ahead and call a substitute.

He leaves work early and finally finds her, sitting in the parking lot of the diner at the edge of town, in the third-hand Taurus she'd joked was the only thing the same as before. He had taken her here, their first night in this town, split a milkshake with her and told her that this wouldn't be the end, it couldn't be, but for now, they would have her picket fence, they would try out this life for a while until someone started asking too many questions and his death sentence began to tick all over again.

He slides in beside her and her cheeks are flushed with the heat. She is still in the sleeveless cotton top and cardigan sweater and soccer-mom skirt she left the house in this morning, and only he knows there is satin underneath. Her hands are clenched hard around the steering wheel, though, polished nails biting into the heels of her hands.

She isn't crying and it's almost more frightening this way.

"I want William back."

He looks down at his hands and the dirty denim stretched over his knees and the gold band around his left ring finger, and nods once without making a sound.

"I need him back." She gasps in a breath, very quietly, and whispers a word he hasn't heard her say in a very long time. "Mulder."

Five feet away a family is climbing out of a dusty Buick, and he traces their movements with his gaze, feeling the familiar sense of nakedness. He doesn't have his weapon. When it came to him, when it fell to him to defend his family, he had proven as ineffective as his well-meaning father. Some nights they sleep in separate rooms and he lets the breeze blow through the screen door, make his skin clammy with secondhand sweat as he watches but does not see the garish late-night talk shows and ads featuring pixellated spliced footage of staged-spontaneous coeds, and regrets that it had ever come to this. Their ten years have dwindled to seven and his son is out there, somewhere, safer than he would ever be with them, and she knows that, they both know that.

"Then we'll get him back."

--

He's not supposed to use the protocol except in case of emergency, but sometimes he does still have those little flashes of insight, the reminder of the chaos that had been his entire existence for so brief a time, and this time, he knows it will be safe. The reply takes three months to come, and in that time she eats little and he sleeps less, each chastising the other.

"Come to bed."

She's standing in the doorway wrapped in a bathrobe with her arms crossed, and he wasn't asleep but the glazed trance is as close as he can bring himself to come anymore, because once she voiced what he had not trusted him to say, he can't deny that every time he remembers what they did have, what she had and had to give up for his sake, it's just another nail pounded into the bed.

He rises without comment, fumbling for the remote and punching buttons with the ball of his thumb until the screen collapses in a square of dwindling darkness.

She looks beautiful when he closes his eyes.

She slips out of the robe, and in the flash of pale grey light through their bedroom window he sees the snake etched against the small of her back before she dives back under the sheets. The tang of frost is in the air and that unnatural honey-blond hair just brushes her shoulder blades as she turns around to look at him.

"You know you have to sleep."

"Tell me why, doctor," he slurs softly in the darkness. The satin strap over her shoulder is the same whore-red as her toes, and he rubs his finger over it a few times. She stretches and the light is so weak that they are nearly black-and-white as they face each other, and her hair is still too pale. The first time he ever buried his hand in her hair and forced her to him for a kiss, the strands had spilled red between his fingers, and that was how he had remembered her, every night they'd ever been apart.

He pushes her under him and gazes down at her, and he can see the hollow in her cheeks, the brown shadow under her eyes as she searches his gaze in return. He's lost so much of himself but he sees what they once were, in her eyes, and it's enough.

He does sleep, after, his face buried in her hair, his arms linked around her waist, and when he wakes their son's name is on his lips.

--

The class spends a unit on genetics, which roughly translates into a week and a half. She sits with her forearm resting on the overhead, scrawling notes with a marker, and she doesn't know the exact moment when their minds start to wander because it's different every day. The student body president passes a note to his girlfriend, two girls at the back start whispering, and she looks down at the notes, catches herself wondering if she should switch to purple, and then remembers, almost numbly, that before all this she could practically have taught a graduate-level course on the same oversimplified concepts she's sugar-coating to cram into these uncaring minds.

Teaching had been punishment. Teaching was where they shoved her when they wanted her out of the way, away from where she was supposed to be. In their next incarnation she would find a way to work at a hospital, to feel as though she was doing some good.

She never thought she'd miss the day when Mulder wouldn't bring her another corpse and give her an hour to figure out why. Why he'd died, why it was important, why anyone else on Earth should care. Her fingertips are white on the marker.

This isn't her life.

The bell rings, the kids file out, and when she's alone in the room she remembers a night in a motor court in Texas, standing in the doorway of a cheap room, watching Mulder grin as he sprawled on her vibrating bed, the moist air sticky on her skin. Another body. Another autopsy. If she'd been able to get close enough to wrap her hands around his neck, she would have choked the life out of him.

_At least then it all counted, it was all for something. Fake plastic fangs and recycled coffins._

When the next class files in, she's still sitting there, humming the Shaft theme song under her breath.

--

They go shopping in one of the immense warehouse stores, which they both hate. If she doesn't keep her fingers linked around his wrist, he disappears, and that, even if nothing else, is familiar.

She wheels the cart past the children's clothes. Matched pinstripe sets and miniature baseball caps and cartoon characters she's never heard of, but she'll have to relearn them all, now. Mulder doesn't give them a second glance, but she can't look away.

He's in a small town three states away, at the northern border. Three states. She has the time already mapped out in her head, the path traced on the atlas with a single pale fingertip more times than she can count.

"Black and sexy," he says, walking backward, and his smile is infectious. In this store black and sexy apparently means thin cheap rayon and wide-banded lace. Her skin, her hair would gleam pale and wan in the moonlight. He reaches for her hand and she jumps, the same way she did the first time he ever touched her, the first time he ever rested a thumb against her lips and met her gaze without dropping it too soon.

"Black and sexy."

William will be too old for the mobile but she kept it anyway, tucked in his blanket, a small piece of what they were. She buys thin matte jet, the color of mourning, for him, for his return. In the parking lot a truck backfires loud in the clear cool air and Mulder's hand gropes at his side, Scully's at her back, for their weapons, phantom severed limbs whose missing pain they still feel, and she ducks her head.

They are not what they were, but they can be nothing else.

In the still close dark of their thirdhand car he buries his hand in her hair and pulls her to him for one long moment, without a sound. His eyelashes are thick on his cheeks when they part. His face is thinner than even she remembers.

He knows loss. He breathes loss, steeps himself in it, traces its meaningless pattern in the files he spends his nights reconstructing from memory, with a mechanical pencil and by the light of a cheap desk lamp, and what gives him solace was once a source of the same, for her. More than twenty years, waiting for some hope for his sister, and finally knowing that only death had brought her peace.

Nothing brings her peace, nothing other than the thought of their son in her arms.

He drives home and the screen door is loose and slamming in the wind, and instead of sleeping they listen to it all night, his ear against her breastbone, her fingers tangled in his hair. She cannot sleep, and he stopped sleeping a long time ago.

"Tomorrow."

She closes her eyes against the pale of the dawn and the first tears slide down her cheeks.

"Tomorrow," she whispers.

--

The dead watch them.

He told her the story that night, after she had gone through the first round of fertility treatments and she felt sick to her stomach, sick with fear and hope and longing. They curled up together over the covers, with her fists tight against her stomach, and he whispered with his breath just tickling her ear, how he had gone through it all, breaking into the facility, the close calls, the clones guarding what had been taken from her. But Byers is dead now, and there is no voice murmuring reassurance into their ears, marking the passage of time, making sure no one is watching them in this bleak stand of thin tall trees, through the wind that drives tears to her eyes, like the thin cold blade of a knife dragging over her skin.

"Here," he whispers, and she follows with her heart high and hot in her throat. The babysitter downstairs was sobbing when they left her, tied to a kitchen chair, alternately pleading and damning with every glance. She did not see their faces, did not see their eyes.

They strip off the masks and exchange one long glance before he turns the knob, gloved fingers sliding against the metal. Downstairs the legs of the chair beat a futile tattoo against the linoleum and she holds her breath like a child.

"William."

There are stars on the walls, she sees them now in the faint light. His face is pale and he turns toward the sound of the creaking door, and at the first sight of him she realizes that from the moment she gave him up, her heart had not beat again, not until he opened his mouth and she could feel the word resting on his lips before he spoke it.

"Mom?"

The dead watch them. The dead watch her sweep her son into her arms and hold him so tight that she can barely breathe, and she sinks to the floor, unheeding of anything else. Mulder catches her, catches the both of them, his hand on his son's hair, and she can feel him breathe, the beginning of words.

When she finally makes it out, it's a prayer running together, and everything, everything in their lives, in this lie, in this wasted time, has been sacrificed for this perfect moment, and she can't find it in herself to regret.

"We have to go," he whispers, with the hint of a smile at William's faint nod.

The note they leave, under the babysitter's terrible glare, is simple.

_I'm sorry._

_We'll keep him safe._

--

Her only demand is that this life not include a Taurus, and he swears that she won't have to drive another Taurus for as long as she lives.

In the tiny bedroom of a third-floor walkup, they lay with their son between them, before her shift at the hospital begins. The boxes aren't yet unpacked, and she hasn't yet stopped watching over her shoulder, but of all their artificially constructed lives, this is the only one that has ever felt like home.

"I thought you were a dream," William says.

"You were," Mulder tells him, and smiles.


End file.
